Clinical LOINC codes and the pCLOCD

At the March 19, 2019 meeting of the Health Terminologies community, a question was raised about whether or not Clinical LOINC codes were added to the pCLOCD given that there are approximately 180 clinical LOINC document codes in the pCLOCD today.

The existing Clinical LOINC codes were added to the pCLOCD at the request of now retired SCWG 2 in support of the pan-Canadian version 3 messages. SCWG 2 wanted concepts that were represented in the Master Terminology Worksheet (MTW) to be reflected in the pCLOCD.

In 2015, Infoway began to receive more requests to add Clinical LOINC codes to LOINC and we asked stakeholders about adding the new concepts to the pCLOCD.

Implementers requested that these LOINC codes not be added to the pCLOCD going forward. It was expressed that outside of the LOINC attributes, the rest of the fields in the pCLOCD were not relevant and adding these codes would increase the overall maintenance burden for implementers without providing any additional value.

This information will be added to the pCLOCD page on InfoCentral so that it is well documented and communicated going forward.

We thank eHO for raising the question and the gap in our external documentation and communications.